The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., of 5,000 antiwar demonstrators in Chicago. In an address to the demonstrators, King declared that the Vietnam War was “a blasphemy against all that America stands for.” King first began speaking out against American involvement in Vietnam in the summer of 1965.
In addition to his moral objections to the war, he argued that the war diverted money and attention from domestic programs to aid the Black poor. He was criticized by some prominent civil rights leaders for attempting to link civil rights and the antiwar movement.
